Foundational API Designs

The earlier chapters enabled learners to understand most of the preliminary concepts required to design an API. Now, we’ll utilize that knowledge to use the REDCAMEL approach to designing an API. Let's start by understanding the need to design foundational problems.

Introduction#

Different applications offer a particular set of services. For example, both YouTube and LeetCode use the search functionality. To design these services, we need to include all the functionalities required for that service. Instead of repeating such functionalities in each design, we define them as foundational design problems and use them as building blocks in relevant design problems.

The foundational design problems are primarily building blocks without which the entire service is incomplete. The purpose of separately designing foundational problems is to thoroughly discuss them once and then reuse them where they are applicable. Moreover, it will be easier for learners to tackle relatively simple design problems first and get a glimpse of our approach for designing a specific API.

This lesson will outline different foundational problems we’ll design and use as building blocks for our main design problems. We’ll discuss the following outlined foundational problems in detail:

Although we have few foundational design problems, we’ll see their use repeatedly in advanced design problems in one way or another. For example, the pub-sub API serves not only as a notification system but also as a decoupling layer for a microservice architecture in most design problems, such as Stripe, LeetCode, Gaming, and so on.